Sunday, November 04, 2007

But there come times—perhaps this is one of them—when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die;when we have to pull back from the incantations,rhythms we’ve moved to thoughtlesslyand disenthrall ourselves, bestowourselves to silence, or a severer listening, cleansedof oratory, formulas, choruses, laments, staticcrowding the wires. We cut the wires,find ourselves in free-fall, as ifour true home were the undimensionalsolitudes, the riftin the Great Nebula.No one who survives to speaknew language, has avoided this:the cutting-away of an old force that held herrooted to an old groundthe pitch of utter lonelinesswhere she herself and all creationseem equally dispersed, weightless, her being a cryto which no echo comes or can ever come.

But in fact we were always like this,rootless, dismembered: knowing it makes the difference.Birth stripped our birthright from us,tore us from a woman, from women, from ourselvesso early onand the whole chorus throbbing at our earslike midges, told us nothing, nothingor origins, nothing we neededto know, nothing that could re-member us.

...

—Adrienne Rich

(Regrettably I don't know which poem this fragment comes from -- a friend gave me just this small piece. Maybe because she knew it was all I needed right now.)